For Bush, bad PR was just the beginning of post-Katrina woes: Stephanie Grace

Here's a bit of news from former President George W. Bush's new memoir that will surprise nobody: Bush rues the infamous photos showing him peering down over the Gulf Coast two days after Hurricane Katrina struck and the levees broke.

The images, which came to signify Bush's perceived aloofness during that dreadful week, were misunderstood, he writes in his book "Decision Points," which hits the shelves today. In fact, Bush wants readers to know, he was distraught over what he saw out the window, the missing bridges in Mississippi, the people stranded on rooftops in New Orleans.

"At some point, our press team ushered photographers into the cabin," Bush writes. "I barely noticed them at the time; I couldn't take my eyes off the devastation below."

"But when the pictures were released I realized I had made a serious mistake," he continues. "The photo of me hovering over the damage suggested I was detached from the suffering on the ground. That wasn't how I felt."

OK, let's concede that Bush was indeed moved by what he saw. His account still misses a much bigger point.

It didn't matter to the people on those rooftops what Bush felt. What mattered was what his administration did.

That, and that alone, is why the flyover photos stood out, even among the shocking images that traveled the globe that horrible week. Rather than send a message that Bush cared, they fueled the perception that he didn't, because evidence of official detachment was already well-established.

In other words, the pictures only became symbols because there was something to symbolize.

To be sure, Bush's chapter on Hurricane Katrina, a disaster widely viewed as a turning point in his eight-year presidency, acknowledges immense government failings. But Bush also spilled a good bit of ink justifying some of his PR missteps, which were hardly the worst of the government's shortcomings.

Just like the pictures, Bush second-guesses his ill-advised decision, in the midst of the utter chaos, to laud FEMA head Michael Brown for a job well done.

The phrase that Bush used, he writes, was actually coined by Alabama Gov. Bob Riley, whose state was largely spared compared to Louisiana and Mississippi, and who told the president "that Mike Brown is doing a heck of a job."

"I knew Mike was under pressure, and I wanted to boost his morale," Bush writes. "When I spoke to the press a few minutes later, I repeated the phrase."

Again, nobody would have remembered the quip if it hadn't seemed so far removed from reality, if Bush hadn't said it while FEMA was actually in the process of failing spectacularly.

In fact, read past the defensiveness, including Bush's lengthy justification for his face-off with Gov. Kathleen Blanco over federalizing the response, and the book pretty much acknowledges that the Homeland Security apparatus he'd created after 9/11 had blown its first test on a grand scale.

"The response was not only flawed but, as I said at the time, unacceptable," Bush writes. "While there were inspiring acts of selflessness and heroism during and after the storm, Katrina conjures impressions of disorder, incompetence and the sense that government let down its citizens.

"As the leader of the federal government, I should have recognized the deficiencies sooner and intervened faster. I prided myself on my ability to make crisp and effective decisions. Yet in the days after Katrina, that didn't happen."

Bush writes that the logistical measures he ordered upon returning to the White House on Wednesday, two days after landfall, were necessary but "seemed inadequate compared to the images of desperation Americans saw on their television screens."

And then there's this stunning admission: Between the "chaos and communications" the government struggled to figure out what was happening at the Superdome, where thousands of people waited for days in squalid conditions. "It took us several days to learn that thousands of other people gathered with no food or water at the New Orleans Convention Center," he continues.

"Just as Katrina was more than a hurricane, its impact was more than physical destruction. It eroded citizens' trust in their government. It exacerbated divisions in our society and politics. And it cast a cloud over my second term."

That's all true.

And it would have been just as true had those infamous photos on Air Force One never been shot.
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Stephanie Grace is a staff columnist. She can be reached at sgrace@timespicayune.com or 504.826.3383. Follow her at twitter.com/stephgracetp.